181–190 of 912 posts
Optane persistent memory had a fascinating value proposition: stop converting data structures for database storage and just persist the data directly. No more booting or application launch or data load: just pick up where you left off. Died because it was too expensive, but probably long after it should have. VM's persist memory snapshots (as do Apple's containers, for macOS at least), so there's still room for somet…
Google Wave. Edit: you asked why. I first saw it at SELF where Chris DiBona showed it to me and a close friend. It was awesome. Real time translation, integration of various types of messaging, tons of cool capabilities, and it was fully open source. What made it out of Google was a stripped down version of what I was shown, the market rejected it, and it was a sad day. Now, I am left with JIRA, Slack, and email. It…
I was blown away by the demo but then after I thought about it, it seemed like a nightmare to me. All the problems of slack of having to manually check channels for updates except X 100 (yea, I get that slack wasn't available then. My point is I saw that it seemed impossible to keep up with nested constantly updated hierarchical threads. Keeping up with channels on slack is bad enough so imagine if Wave had succeeded…
The information superhighway The internet before advertising, artificial intelligence, social media and bots. When folks created startups in their bedrooms or garages. The days when google slogan was “don’t be evil”.
A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Go…
I’m still using - free g suite - play music - finance - nfc wallet is just google wallet isn’t it? - chromecast, video and audio-only I guess play music is now YouTube music, and doesn't have uploads, so that can be considered dead, but the others seem alive to me.
Microsoft Silverlight. Full C# instead of god forbidden js. Full vector dpi aware UI, with grid, complex animation, and all other stuff that html5/css didn’t have in 2018 but silverlight had even in 2010 (probable even earlier). MVVM pattern, two-way bindings. Expression Blend (basically figma) that allowed designers create UI that was XAML, had sample data, and could be used be devs as is with maybe some cleanup. Ex…
In the late 90s there was a website called fuckedcompany which was a place where people could spill the beans about startups (mainly in silicon valley). It was anonymous and a pretty good view into the real state of tech. Now there is twitter/x but it's not as focused on this niche.
Dual screen iPad killer, productivity optimised. IIRC Microsoft OneNote is its only legacy.
Killed because both the Windows team and the Office team thought it was stepping on their toes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. No matter how cool the engineering might have been, from the perspective of what surveillance policies it would have (and very possibly did) inspire/set precedent for… Apple was very much creating the Torment Nexus from “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.”
> from the perspective of what surveillance policies it would have (and very possibly did) inspire/set precedent for… I can’t think of a single thing that’s come along since that is even remotely similar. What are you thinking of? I think it’s actually a horrible system to implement if you want to spy on people. That’s the point of it! If you wanted to spy on people, there are already loads of systems that exist whic…
Once that idea appears, it allows every lobbyist and insider to say “mandate this, we’ll do something like what Apple did but for other types of Bad People” and all of a sudden you have regulations that force messaging systems to make this possible in the name of Freedom.
Remember: if a model can detect CSAM at scale, it can also detect anyone who possesses any politically sensitive image. There are many in politics for whom that level of control is the actual goal.
The "Eve" programming language / IDE - https://witheve.com It was a series of experiments with new approaches to programming. Kind of reminded me of the research that gave us Smalltalk. It would have been interesting to see where they went with it, but they wound down the project.